Creating a Black History Collection

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Author: Rex Butler

The United States (unlike England who use the 31 day month October) has chosen the shortest month of the year to celebrate Black History but I have managed to get 30 days to celebrate this year by starting a day early in this leap year. Basically I cheated, deal with it.

This is the year of the last term of our first black president and, while that is a historically significant fact, so are the facts of the police killings that demands the development of interventions like “Black Lives Matter” to remind society of a fact that should be obvious but clearly is not, that we have a serious human rights crisis here. However, rather than getting into yet another acknowledgement of our racist society, I am interested in sharing a wonderful positive experience that I hope will provide as much inspiration to my readers as it did to the…

Among the number of Unsung African American heroes who are usually forgotten is Joseph Charles Price. He was a major African American leader between 1880 – 1893.

Joseph Charles Price was born in Elizabeth City, N.C. on Feb. 10, 1854. Emily Paulin, his mother, was born a free African American woman and his father, Charles Dozier, was a slave. During Slavery the child always followed the status of the mother. Since Price’s mother was a free woman, he also was a free child. Price and his mother moved to New Bern, N.C., to…

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Black History Collecting

Collecting is available to anyone in every city and state. You can start with a book, a post card, or a record album. Your collection will include items near you and around you. Someone from Texas will have items from their community and they will differ from items collected in North Carolina. As your collection grows you will find historical items that the whole country will be familiar with such as an old newspaper about Rosa Parks.

I will share with you what I have found, and where I found it when possible, and hopefully you will begin to appreciate or should I say, celibrate the amazing Black History that is all around us.

This is a “work in progress” for me. I hope you come along and see the wonderful pieces of Black History that I have collected.

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I look at art from two perspectives. I include African American artists as well as African Americans as the subject of art. Virginia Fouche Bolton was a beloved South Carolina artist known for her watercolors of Charleston and the Gullah people of Edisto.

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Once in a while, I will get my soapbox out and share what’s on my mind. This is my first SOAPBOX.

The way I feel right now, the smile, the joy and the amazement is exactly how I hope a child feels when they see a piece of Black History. It is the connection, the touching and being touched by something real and historical.